Austria, Germany, China 2013: Part 5 – Frankfurt, Robert-Johnson, and Timewarp

This is part 5 of a series on my trip to Austria, Germany and China.

I received 40,000 of the 100,000 miles I used for this award ticket by getting the US Airways® Premier World MasterCard®!  This is a great card and one I still carry.  These miles will eventually become American miles which are some of the most valuable.  Click here to apply now for one of your own!

We elected to get a hotel in Frankfurt instead of Mannheim because it was just an hour train ride away. We figured there would be more to do in Frankfurt since the festival was the only thing in Mannheim.  In retrospect, getting a hotel in Mannheim at least for the nights after the festival would have been a good idea since we ended up at the after party which was in Mannheim anyways.

The first thing I always do when traveling to avoid huge roaming charges is to get a local SIM card for my unlocked iPhone.  This also gives you a local number for communicating with friends and calling hotels, etc. I found a Deutsche Telekom store and took my passport and was able to get a prepaid card with I think 500MB of 3G data for €20 and then I put another €20 on there for calls and texts.

The hotel prices were really expensive the first two nights we were there for some reason and we hadn’t booked an advance reservation for the hotel so we ended up getting one of the hidden deals on Hotwire.com for $126 a night that was the Westin in a great location in Frankfurt right near the pedestrian street Zeil.IMG_7902

Since I have Gold status with SPG, they gave us an upgraded room even though they didn’t have to since it was a Hotwire booking.

There was even a mall with a neat glass climbing wall and waterfall right in the middle of it!IMG_7901

The Westin had great beds which was important so we could get a good night’s sleep and get over our jet lag.  I don’t normally get too lagged but this time with the combination of a coach flight and then our layover in Vienna, it hit me pretty hard.

Friday night, we headed to the famous Robert Johnson club for Magda and Troy Pierce with my friend Jean-Carlos who drove up from Rammstein. We were a little worried since the club is very hard to get into sometimes and we arrived after midnight, but we were able to walk right in.  Magda was playing great but we left around 5 or so to save our energy for Timewarp the next day.  Andres was excited to be back in Europe so he could have a proper döner kebap.IMG_7906.The next day we moved to the Ramada near Hauptbahnhof that I found for a rate of only E49 a night!

Jean-Carlos drove up and gave us a luxury high speed ride to Mannheim.IMG_7910

Timewarp was pretty incredible.  There are six different stages and it was hard to decide sometimes which was the best.  Here are some pics and videos that I took from the festival.

I also ran into my friend Bart from Belgium who I met at the Ibiza closing parties.  It was great to see him again!

IMG_7934After the festival we ran into some DJs I know and they told us about a semi private after party at a little club called Zimmer in Mannheim that we could go to.  We had been up all night at this point so decided to go back and shower and change before the after party.  This was when a hotel in Mannheim would have been the better option.  We walked through a bit of Mannheim and it looked like a nice little town when the madness of Timewarp wasn’t happening.IMG_7944

The after party was legendary with a who’s who list of DJs both spinning and just hanging out right beside and with you. Seth Troxler, Dubfire, Jamie Jones, Nick Curly, Mathias Tanzmann, Marco Carola, and more.IMG_7947

IMG_7951  Such an amazing experience in a small intimate setting.  The party ended at around 4 and we caught the first train back into Frankfurt where I could sleep for an hour or so before heading to the airport.  It was time for Andres and I to part ways: He was going back to Miami while I was continuing onto Beijing aboard an Austrian Airlines 767-300 in business class!